


Between the Wars

by starlet2367



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Brooklyn, Captain - Freeform, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, New York City, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-14
Updated: 2017-03-14
Packaged: 2018-10-04 15:31:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10282199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlet2367/pseuds/starlet2367
Summary: Two old friends meet in a bar.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Celeste666](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celeste666/gifts).



> In honor of [Celeste666](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Celeste666/pseuds/Celeste666)'s birthday. A gift for her, and for her OC, Cedar Waxwing. And thanks to [landrews](http://archiveofourown.org/users/landrews/pseuds/landrews) for the beautiful beta.

Bucky sat at the bar hunched over a highball glass with one finger of whiskey left in the bottom. It was his fourth in the last hour, and while the bartender was giving him the stink eye, Bucky wasn’t drunk. 

One of the unexpected side benefits of being cryogenically frozen: You could metabolize the hell out of some booze. 

He slugged back the last of the brown, and tapped his glass. The bartender hesitated then poured another shot. “Last one,” he said. “Then I’m calling you a cab.”

Bucky shrugged. He was about done, anyway. 

This wasn’t the bar he remembered. It was the right location – down in Red Hook, where the longshoremen used to come to unwind after work. The kind of place he and Steve met for a drink before he shipped out nearly 80 years ago.

But now it was filled with kitschy, nautical knick-knacks and know-it-all, bearded, flannel-wearing kids, the kind of people that had always given him hives.

The floor was the same, though – wood, worn to the point of being unfinished. And he thought he recognized the neon anchor in the window. But he missed the ships and the longshoremen and the bartenders who kept pouring.

It was odd, which memories surfaced and when.

The most Steve could tell him was what their friendship had been like and what experiences they’d shared. All from his perspective. 

Buck had flashes here and there – being trapped on a cold table, feeling the warmth of memories slip away again and again, being surrounded by ice. 

He felt fury rising and had to concentrate to tamp it down. Even his anger felt like icy fire.

As for Steve, he had no real feelings about those stories. He couldn’t remember the nuances of their friendship, the million little things that went through his head and never made it past his lips because they were impossible to express. The things that made up and influenced his feelings toward people. 

Someone jostled him from behind and he tensed again, his first instinct to fight. Then he forced himself to settle. Again.

His training made him a weapon; his body was constantly ready to go to war. His main memories were of power – pure, animal power. And his body moving of its own accord, trained so instinctively that it fought even when his mind went dormant.

He sat at the end of the bar next to the window, the red anchor flashing on and off, the light striping his hands. He kept his jacket on, and he wore his gloves, but there was a gap between the left sleeve and the top of the glove, and the sliver of metal at his exposed wrist flashed along with the anchor, like a heartbeat.

The neon made a low thrum that seemed to be, at once, light and sound.

He turned the glass 45 degrees and ignored the woman shouting her order for a Pabst over his shoulder. He could smell her hairspray, sharp and metallic, and her lotion, a chemical-scented vanilla. 

He didn’t remember women smelling that way. He remembered gardenias, violets, Shalimar and the powdery scent of Aqua Net.

There was a click in the back of his throat when he swallowed, so he drew in another mouthful of whiskey and hunched down farther.

Longing, Rusted, Seventeen, Daybreak, Furnace ….

He closed his eyes. Praying for the words to stop. Feeling the wash of helpless horror that came over him every time he heard them. 

But this time, since they echoed in his head and didn’t come from outside, he didn’t change. He stayed where he was on the barstool, feeling half in his body and half out. 

Not sure if this was real or a dream.

The barstool to his left opened up and he dreaded the thought that the woman-who-smelled-too-strong might sit, but instead a man slipped in beside him. He had the impression of khaki pants, a leather bomber jacket, blond hair. 

“You’re my mission,” echoed in his head, along with a flash of a falling shield.  
And of pulling Steve’s body out of the water.

His hands tensed around the glass. He had to consciously relax them to keep from crushing it to dust. 

“That’d be a sad waste of whiskey,” said Steve, glancing down at Buck’s hands, trembling now with the effort. 

Bucky unwrapped them and put them flat on the bar. 

Click click click – memories like a video reel unspooling. 

“I thought you were smaller,” he said, to the suddenly bulked-up Steve.

And then, farther back, “I’m here till the end of the line.” 

With that, the urge to kill drew back into the shadows. Bucky blinked.

The bar wavered – so did Steve – so he blinked again. His mind was FUBAR. He couldn’t be trusted. Maybe it was time to turn himself in. Go back to sleep until the tech caught up, and they could fix his brokenness.

He could sense the warmth of Steve’s hip against his, even through his leather pants. The one bit of warmth he could feel. He grasped it like a lifeline.

“Coke,” said Steve, to the bartender. 

“How’d you find me?” asked Bucky.

The anchor pulsed.

Steve shrugged. “I could tell you it was my supernatural sleuthing ability, but Tony stuck a tracker to the back of your arm.” He moved his thumb in the direction of Buck’s metal limb.

Tony. 

While Buck’s memories of both Tony and Howard were limited, he knew in the hard, cold stone of his heart that Tony was as arrogant as Howard had been – and, if possible, smarter. 

Another memory, this one exploding like a shell. 

Forcing Stark’s car off the road. Lifting Howard’s head – seeing the resignation in his eyes as he broke Howard’s skull with two hard punches from his mechanical hand. 

Howard had known how the game would end.

But Maria was innocent. He’d moved on autopilot as he’d rounded the car, something at his core screaming out against what he was about to do. 

He couldn’t look at her, as he’d looked at Howard. He’d stared over the top of the car as he used his weaponized hand to crush her windpipe.

Ice. Falling from a train. A plunge into water so cold that it turned the world black.

He blinked, trying to make sense of these last impressions. Real or dream?

He’d preferred it when he remembered nothing.

The bartender set Steve’s soda on a white napkin and put two thin, red straws in it. 

Steve immediately removed the straws, lined them up on the napkin like shoes next to an army cot, and took a drink. “First time I had a Coke, I was, what, nine? Ten? Never get tired of the fizz. Lights your brain right up.”

Bucky grunted and rotated his glass again, the whiskey undulating in the glass, wondering, when was the first time he’d had a Coke? Such a little thing, but in the scheme of his fucked-up world, such a big one.

He envied Steve the luxury of his life, having his history at his fingertips. Nobody wanted to live forever, but if you had to, like they seemingly did, at least you should be able to remember it.

Steve looked at him. “So, Brooklyn, huh?”

Bucky shrugged. “And the Smithsonian and a few other places.”

Steve said, “Hmm,” and then took another mouthful of Coke.

They sat for a minute as the crowd got thicker and the bar got hotter. As Steve unzipped his jacket, Bucky zipped his higher against his internal permafrost.

“Man, this place brings back memories.” Steve tipped his drink toward the bar. “Remember when it was … what was it? John’s? Had our first beer here.” He laughed.

Buck was exhausted. So tired. He felt sick to his stomach all of the time. He knew he’d been happy before, but now he felt desperate and trapped. 

Not just because he’d been mentally pried apart and put back together in the deadliest of ways, but because he’d lost the thing he’d always fought to preserve: freedom. 

He had no context. He never knew if something he wanted to do or say was appropriate or right or even true. 

A woman laughed loud and shrill and then more people joined her. Buck felt his shoulders tense as the blank parts of his brain throbbed like neon.

“You still with me?” Steve asked.

Falling from the train through air so cold it was brassy, watching Steve’s face grow farther and farther away, as if he were looking at him from under water.

Buck slugged back the last of his drink. “About not to be,” he said, standing and throwing a fifty on the bar. 

Steve threw his own money on the bar and stood, zipping his jacket back up. 

In the bar’s light, his hair looked like an old, gold coin Buck had seen in Italy during the war.

And why that memory? Why now?

“Where are you heading from here?” Steve asked.

Bucky looked around. The bar wavered again and he felt light-headed and queasy. 

“Buck?” 

Steve’s voice was distant. The throb of the neon morphed completely from light to sound. A low, rhythmic beep. A brassy cold. Steve’s face, as if through water.

“I think he’s awake.” Steve yelled over his shoulder.

His face was blurry and indistinct, but from the old-gold glow of his hair, and the sound of his voice, Buck knew it was Steve. And he knew they were friends.

The dream he’d been having – a bar? Brooklyn? – faded. 

Through the window of the cryo-chamber, he had a vague sense of movement. But he was under the water. And he was so cold. 

Forever winter. Wherever he was.

Then there were more beeps and a hissing sound in the tank, like gas being released. He felt his arm and his legs twitch in myoclonic jerks. His heartbeat slowed, pulsing in his chest like red neon.

Steve put his hand against the glass. “Sleep, Buck,” he said. “When you wake up, I’ll be here.”

Bucky felt himself sliding back under the water.

Then he was once again at the bar, throwing a fifty on the counter and standing up to leave.

“Where are you heading from here?” Steve asked.

“To the end of the line,” said Bucky.

Steve slung his arm around Bucky’s shoulder and turned them toward the door. “Good,” he said. “I’m going that way, too.”

END


End file.
